General

Despite rampant piracy which forced the record company to release it several weeks early and disrupted their advertising campaign, Eminem’s new CD sold nearly 300,000 copies during the first long weekend to debut at number 1.

“We’ve never had a record debut at No. 1 on the SoundScan chart that hasn’t had the benefit of a full six days of sales behind it,” said Mike Shalett, chief executive of SoundScan. Yet Interscope Geffen A&M, the label behind Eminem, insists that illegal copies, made from one of three closely guarded master copies sent to manufacturers, hurt the release.

I believe most people will buy a CD after sampling several tracks by downloading MP3s, if it’s something they want to listen to.

Cody just killed a huge palmetto bug. For anyone who doesn’t live in Florida, that’s what we have instead of cockroaches. They’re basically the same thing except bigger & more disgusting. This one was the size of a small mouse.

Cody played with it for about 10 minutes before he finally killed it and he kept watching it for another 15 minutes to make sure it was really dead.

Homogenized Music [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Someone finally said it: radio is crap. I almost never listen to the radio for music, since they never play anything I want to hear. I’m not into top-40 stuff – I don’t listen to Britney & N’sync.

Lately I’ve started listening to Miami’s new all dance music station, 93.1, but even they play the same songs over and over again. At least it isn’t top-40 pop songs.

Most of the time I just listen to CDs. I usually burn 80-minute music mix CDs to listen to in my car, so I don’t have to change CDs as often & I can listen to the songs I like rather than what the record companies think I should listen to.

Devin Powell’s car wouldn’t start this afternoon, because he left his headlights on all day while he was at school. So we pushed the little mercury all around the parking lot (and pretty damn fast too) before realizing you can’t start an automatic that way (apparently). So he got jumped. But now Layne can’t find out where those jumper cables jumped off to… [Jeremiah Rogers Weblog]

That was never a problem with my 1995 Toyota Corolla. I left my headlights on all the time, and as soon as I removed my key from the ignition & opened my door, it would automatically turn off the headlights. That was a great feature, and I got used to just leaving them on and not thinking about it.

Unfortunately, that changed with my 2003 Corolla. They added daylight running lights & it now has an alarm if I forget to shut the headlights, but they removed that auto shutoff feature. I’ll have to get used to thinking about turning the headlights on & off again.

Other than that, I love my new car. It’s bigger than the 95 model & a lot more comfortable.

Apparently it’s illegal to sell dildos in the state of Texas. Worse yet, having more than six dildos constitutes the intent to distribute them, so zealous dong ownership alone is against the law. No wonder Bush is such a tight-ass! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

I knew Texas had the nation’s dumbest laws, but this proves it.

I just spent a few hours getting WorldBeatPlanet back up. BounceWeb had a serious hardware crash, resulting in loss of many accounts & all data. Thankfully I always keep backups of all of my code on my own machine. Unfortunately all of the content is in a MySQL database and my SQL backup was almost a month old.

This time I plan to set up a cron job to automatically back it up & send a copy to my machine. I’ve been able to do that easily with MacMegasite, since I can connect to their server remotely from mysqldump running on my own machine. However, bounceweb doesn’t allow remote connections to mysql, so I’ll have to set up a job on their server with their help.

I just bought a 2003 Toyota Corolla today, trading in my 1995 Corolla. If I kept the old car, it would have cost me $800 to fix the air conditioner. I had spent $400 on a minor repair just before I moved, so it was getting to the point where it cost too much to keep.

Awwww…. how cute!

[Yahoo News]

Digital Content Smackdown.

“In Hollywood Wants to Plug the ‘Analog Hole’, Cory Doctorow reveals key points of the ‘Content Protection Status Report’ filed with the Senate Judiciay Committee by the MPAA ÷ a document that lays out the Evil Empire’s Internet-destruction plans, which involve turning humble ADCs (Analog/Digital Converters) into content permission valves that would govern approximately the full range of ‘content’ use:

‘Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a “cop-chip” that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material ÷ your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo.

The report shows that this ADC regulation is part of a larger agenda. The first piece of that agenda, a mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over digital television technology, is weeks away from coming to fruition. Hollywood also proposes a radical redesign of the Internet to assist in controlling the distribution of copyrighted works.

This three-part agenda — controlling digital media devices, controlling analog converters, controlling the Internet — is a frightening peek at Hollywood’s vision of the future.’

You know what to do. If you don’t, read Cory’s report.” [Doc Searls Weblog]

Be an informed consumer. Read up on this stuff. Make your voice heard. Librarians especially need to consider how destructive such a future would be on our ability to circulate digital content (as in, we won’t be able to).

[The Shifted Librarian]

This is one of the stupidest ideas ever. If it passes, it will be a major disaster.

I just had a CD go bad on me: “Bamba” by Orchestra Baobab. The second song won’t play, although the rest of it does. I could either buy a new one or burn a copy. Luckly I have an MP3 of that song, which I found on Napster last year.